Odes 1.26

A garland from the Muses

The charm of this little masterpiece is hard to convey in translation – as ever with Horace’s odes, it depends largely on the dance of the metre, which can’t be paralleled in English. The form that it takes, an invocation to a deity (Piplis is one of the haunts of the muses), is also less familiar and natural in the modern, than it was in the ancient, world. The piece expresses Horace’s pride in his standing as a stylistic innovator – the “new strains” in the last stanza – while acknowledging his debt to the poet Alcaeus, the originator, five centuries before, of the metre that Horace is using here in a new Roman form. The poem and the garland for which he asks are one and the same, and he is celebrating both the divine inspiration of the muses and his own poetic skill.

See the illustrated blog post here.

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Musis amicus tristitiam et metus
tradam protervis in mare Creticum
portare ventis, quis sub Arcto
rex gelidae metuatur orae,

quid Tiridaten terreat, unice
securus. o quae fontibus integris
gaudes, apricos necte flores,
necte meo Lamiae coronam,

Piplei dulcis. nil sine te mei
prosunt honores: hunc fidibus novis,
hunc Lesbio sacrare plectro
teque tuasque decet sorores.

I am a friend of the muses, and will give fears and melancholy over to be carried off by the rushing winds to the Cretan sea – I care nothing whatever about which king of some frozen region under the Great Bear may be frightening the people, or whatever fears may be oppressing Tiridates in Parthia. O lady of Piplis, who take delight in springs of pure water, weave flowers that the sun has touched, weave a garland for my dear friend Lamia! Without you, the honours that I can give are useless: It is fitting for you, and your sister-muses, to immortalise this man with new strains and Alcaeus’s Lesbian lyre!

More Poems by Horace

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